Employers will no longer be allowed to take rent out of migrant workers’ minimum wage

An employer in the Netherlands can currently keep up to a quarter of a migrant worker’s minimum wage before it is paid out, in exchange for a bed. The cabinet has now set a date for ending that: from 1 July 2028 the deduction will no longer be allowed.

“I want to prevent unscrupulous employers from using housing and deductions from the minimum wage as a business model,” social affairs minister Hans Vijlbrief wrote to parliament. “Many migrant workers are now too dependent on their boss for a place to sleep. That is why I am scrapping the scheme. Employers must let migrant workers pay a fair price for housing.”

What the rule allows today

Dutch law protects the minimum wage from deductions, with a short list of exceptions. Housing is the big one. An employer that provides certified accommodation may withhold up to 25% of the gross statutory minimum wage to cover it, and the worker never sees that money.

At the current minimum hourly wage of 14.99 euros, a full-time week comes to roughly 2,600 euros gross a month. A quarter of that is about 650 euros, which is what an employer may take for a bed in a shared house, often a room shared with strangers, on the edge of a greenhouse district or a distribution park.

The ministry’s own finding, cited in the announcement, is that employers regularly withhold the maximum while the quality of the housing does not justify it. The arrangement also ties the roof to the job: lose the contract and you lose the bed in the same week.

Who this is about

Estimates of the number of migrant workers in the Netherlands run from 600,000 to 900,000, with roughly 50,000 more arriving each year, most of them from Poland, Romania, Hungary, Ukraine and increasingly Georgia. They pick, pack, slaughter, sort and drive: meat processing, greenhouses, distribution centres, cleaning and construction lean on them, and the work is often paid at or close to the minimum.

The deduction is the mechanism that turns a wage into a package. Housing, transport, health insurance and the job arrive together from the same employment agency, and every one of them can be withdrawn together too. That dependence is what the government’s own advisory team on migrant workers, chaired by Emile Roemer, identified in 2020 as the root of the abuses, and what it asked the cabinet to break.

A plan that was already on the books, and never started

This is not the first time the deduction has been sentenced to death. In February 2025 the previous social affairs minister, Eddy van Hijum, announced a phase-out: the 25% ceiling would fall by 5 points a year from January 2026 and disappear entirely on 1 January 2030. “We see that employers are using the deduction option too much as a business model,” he said at the time.

That cabinet fell before the first step was taken. The ceiling is still 25% today. The new plan drops the glide path and cuts once, on 1 July 2028, 18 months earlier than the old end date.

Why 2028, and what comes with it

The date is not arbitrary. The cabinet has tied the abolition to a separate housing bill from the minister for housing and spatial planning, the Wet passende huur, which is meant to give migrant workers proper tenant protection and rent-price protection. The target is for that law to take effect on 1 July 2028, and the deduction is to vanish the same day.

The logic is that the two problems feed each other. Taking away the deduction alone could push employers to charge rent openly at whatever level they choose; adding tenant protection alone would leave the money flowing through the pay slip where the worker cannot see it. Doing both at once, the ministry says, strengthens the worker’s financial position and housing position together, and reduces dependence on the employer.

Nothing changes for the worker before then. For nearly 2 more years an agency may still keep up to a quarter of the minimum wage for a bed, and the only protection is that the bed must be in certified housing. The bill still has to pass both chambers of parliament, and the date is a target, not a promise.